> Would I ever personally want to write the "raw" code to work with the Shadow DOM (not from the looks of it) unless I were a developer of some low-level framew

> Would I ever personally want to write the "raw" code to work with the Shadow DOM (not from the looks of it) unless I were a developer of some low-level framework that needs to be optimized to not manipulate the real DOM? You probably won't write the raw code yourself. These web component APIs are generally low level and with few conveniences. The idea is that your Framework of Choice would do the raw code and you dear application developer would get it in some handy "cooked" way which matched your framework. (For example, maybe outputting isolated components could be simple boolean in your build configuration.) Too many people think that the raw web component specs are meant to compete with frameworks like React etc. But that is huge misunderstanding. They're low level APIs which frameworks can build on.